Understated eloquence

It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature as a novelist,’ Mary-Kay Wilmers wrote in her sniffy, uncomprehending Times Literary Supplement review, ‘is that his analysis of society is obedient to Conservative economic principles.’ In the ensuing half century Mount has proven resolute in his Conservativism. He had two spells as a gloriously shrewd political columnist in The Spectator, headed Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit, wrote the Tory manifesto for the 1983 general election, and edited the TLS under Rupert Murdoch’s proprietorship.

Wilmers’s disapproval of Mount has relaxed a bit — perhaps because he is a closeted baronet who won’t use the title that he inherited. Under her editorship of the London Review of Books, he has become the least fanatical of LRB contributors. His essay ‘Nigels against the World’, published there last May, put the case for a Remain vote more effectively than anything else I read. There have been many more books since Very Like a Whale: doughty social critiques; Cold Cream, a bewitching, rueful, grudge-free memoir of childhood and early manhood; the urbane and unerring essays in English Voices; and a dozen novels.

If Grey Gowrie is the most undervalued poet of our times, because he is an Etonian earl, an ex-member of Thatcher’s cabinet and a former chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, Mount has similarly been cheated of his due as a novelist because he is an Etonian Conservative. ‘The novel’s fantastic, what a shame he was a Tory propagandist,’ sneered the Independent’s headline writer above a review of Heads You Win. Both Gowrie and Mount are too assured but unostentatious in their work, too careful and immaculate in their choice of words, to be noticed in a world of hotheads, loudmouths and narcissistic personality disorder.